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Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Story Jenga

Sorry if this is kind of loopy; I'm pretty sleepy.

The 2.5/40 is going fine; I'm at least 1.75 hours ahead as of Tuesday night. (Except, I'm strongly considering more or less reverting back to my previous draft of Chosen: Bonnie of Sheshack. That would mean more or less ignoring most of my painstaking outline/snowflake. There's a whole lot of passion in that earlier draft, though I've of course made some good changes...hm. JENGA!)

So if you're not aware, Maggie Phillippi and I have been editing "The Healer and the Pirate." We're through with Draft 2 and editing our way to Draft 3. Then, God willing, it will be one quick read-through and then we'll likely put it out as an eBook.

ANYWAY. We're having some troubles with what I call Story Jenga. You ever play Jenga? Where you have to pull out wooden blocks and if you pull the wrong piece, the whole tower collapses? That happens a lot in my writing. I make a change somewhere and those changes affect later parts until I end up making major revisions throughout a chapter, or even farther. Kind of like going back in time and smashing a butterfly.

Frankly, when it happens in "The Healer and the Pirate," I've gotten to the point where I just type JENGA! to Maggie.

The Arizona Ren Faire has a large Jenga tower for kids to play with. I couldn't find a picture of it, but here's a stack of French fries and I think a plank of fish. If you took the wrong fry down, I'll bet it'd topple.

Interestingly, the Internet says that "Jenga" is actually Swahili for "build." And I do think that often times, these changes that result in story collapse can eventually make the story stronger. But it sure is annoying to pick up all those pieces.